For instance, take one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Jeff Bridges. After running a Family Forest® kinship report I found some connections to the 83rd Academy Awards within Jeff’s almost 300,000 relatives.

For instance, take one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Jeff Bridges. After running a Family Forest® kinship report I found some connections to the 83rd Academy Awards within Jeff’s almost 300,000 relatives.

They include two of his co-stars from “True Grit” Matt Damon (19C1R) and Josh Brolin (21C2R), King George VI (17C2R) from “The King’s Speech” who was portrayed by another one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Actor in a Leading Role, Colin Firth, and one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Amy Adams (24C2R) for her role in “The Fighter.”

Philippa was eight years old at the time of her assessment. She lived to become Queen of England and the ancestor of certainly hundreds of millions of people living today, including last year’s Oscar winner and this year’s Oscar nominee, Jeff Bridges, the focal point of the next blog.

According to Bishop Stapeldon of Exeter who was sent to inspect her, “The lady … has not uncomely hair, betwixt blue-black and brown. Her head is clean shaped; her forhead high and broad, and standing somewhat forward. Her face narrows between the eyes, and the lower part of her face is still more narrow and slender than her forhead. Her eyes are blackish-brown and deep. Her nose is fairly smooth and even, save that it is somewhat broad at the tip and flattened, yet it is no snub-nose. Her nostrils are also broad, her mouth fairly wide. Her lips somewhat full, and especially the lower lip. Her teeth which have fallen and grown again are white enough, but the rest are not so white. The lower teeth project a little beyond the upper; yet this is but little seen. Her ears and chin are comely enough. Her neck, shoulders, and all her body and lower limbs are reasonably well shapen; all her limbs are well set and unmaimed; and none is amiss so far as a man may see. Moreover, she is of brown skin all over, and much like her father; and in all things she is pleasant enough, as it seems to us.”

The Bishop also added she was neither too tall nor too short for her age, and that she was of fair carriage, and well taught in all that becometh her rank.

Philippa of Hainault was eight years old at the time of her assessment. She lived to become Queen of England and the ancestor of certainly hundreds of millions of people living today, including last year’s Oscar winner and this year’s Oscar nominee, Jeff Bridges, the focal point of the next blog.

The central framework of Philippa’s lines of descent to present day can be found in this eBook.

Anyone with a Family Forest® National Treasure Edition can easily pull up various size ancestor charts for Philippa, including a 10-generation chart with 838 boxes filled in, and a 60-generation chart with 764,590 boxes filled in.

This is one illustration of why we believe at least two billion living people have more of their early ancestry already assembled in the Family Forest® than they can see anywhere else.

P. S. The Bishop’s assessment can be found on page 81 of Debrett’s Kings and Queens of Britain by David Williamson.

Before I found Horatio I found his father, also named Horatio Gates Spafford. He was mentioned in a book of letters written by Thomas Jefferson, who held Horatio, Sr. in high regard.

Last night I ran a Family Forest kinship report for Horatio the hymnist.

Last Sunday we were treated to a captivating organ recital at church by our organist and choir director, Dwight Beacham. Before he played “It is Well with My Soul” he told us the poignant story behind the hymn.

Horatio Gates Spafford was a prominent lawyer in Chicago, IL who had suffered devastating losses as a prelude to writing this popular hymn. Two years after his family had lost all of their possessions in a fire in 1871, he was planning to take his wife and four young daughters, aged two to eleven, aboard the steamer “Ville de Havre” to visit Europe.

He was unable to leave with them and expected to catch up with them soon. Before he could, he received news of the sinking of the “Ville de Havre” in which 287 people perished. The terse telegram message from his wife Anna said only “Saved alone.”

Horatio wrote “It is Well with My Soul” while at sea passing over the site of that tragedy on his way to reach his wife.

So I came home and quickly discovered that Horatio Gates Spafford was not yet in the Family Forest and that I needed to do some research to connect him in (no one gets into the Family Forest until they are connected by birth, marriage or occassionally adoption to someone who is already in).

Before I found Horatio I found his father, also named Horatio Gates Spafford. He was mentioned in a book of letters written by Thomas Jefferson, who held Horatio, Sr. in high regard.

Last night I ran a Family Forest kinship report for Horatio the hymnist. It was relatively short as far as these reports go, 60 pages versus the normally 6,000 plus pages for anyone who has been connected into the royal channel, and I was expecting to see only a couple of recognizible names.

Instead, I found the person associated with the term “And You Were There,” Walter Cronkite (6C3R), playwright Tennesse Williams (also 6C3R), and seven US Presidents. They were President Arthur (6C), both Presidents Bush (6C4R and 6C5R), President Ford (6C4R), President Cleveland (husband of a 6C2R), President Garfield (6C1R), and President Hoover (4C4R).

I wonder if any of those presidents knew of their family ties to those four little girls who lost their lives to bring this hymn to so many people?

I wonder how many everyday people know of their family ties to this hymn and the story behind it?

In real life, the actor who played little Ralphie, the central character of A Christmas Story has family ties to The White House, according to the vast network of ancestral pathways mapped out in the Family Forest®.

Through their Crabtree ancestors, Peter Billingsley and President Obama are ninth cousins.

Also through this same line, President Obama is also a cousin of Glenn Billingsley. Glenn’s wife Barbara is best known as June Cleaver, Oprah’s childhood television heroine and Wally and Beaver’s mother on Leave It To Beaver.

Thus the First Family has family ties to not only one of the most popular Christmas movies of the last two decades, but also to one of the most popular TV families of the twentieth century.

Now with the grand opening dedication of the new Pearl Harbor Visitors Center on the 69th Anniversary of the attack, this December 7th 2010 we have another way of honoring these men and women.

Let us never forget what happened on this day 69 years ago at Pearl Harbor. Some of us can only remember it from the history books, the stories we have heard of heroes, and the movies we have seen. For some of our parents and grandparents, it is still a very vivid memory that changed their lives.

Now with the grand opening dedication of the new Pearl Harbor Visitors Center on the 69th Anniversary of the attack, this December 7th 2010 we have another way of honoring these men and women. We can visit there, take a journey back in time with the latest in digital technology, and reflect on what happened on that day in history.

Thinking well can payoff. For a limited time during the holidays, just email us a reasonable answer to any one of these ten questions, and you can download a Family Forest® Ancestral History eBook of your choice at absolutely no charge.

The Family Forest® Project is, among a number of other objectives, Networking Family History with Hollywood™. If we explore the descendants of Kate’s Fairfax ancestors who were mentioned in the AP article, we find some interesting entertainment and celebrity cousins of Kate.

An Associated Press news story Tuesday reported on some of Kate Middleton’s famous relatives. All of the connections they announced, plus many more networked connections, could have been explored visually a year ago in the Family Forest® National Treasure Edition.

The Family Forest® Project is, among a number of other objectives, Networking Family History with Hollywood™. If we explore the descendants of Kate’s Fairfax ancestors who were mentioned in the AP article, we find some interesting entertainment and celebrity cousins of Kate.

Other Fairfax cousins are AOL founder Steve Case, incoming Wyoming Governor Matt Mead, and 2010 World Series ­­­participants President George Herbert Walker Bush and President George Walker Bush.

If we widen the net just a little further by backing up one more generation to Sir William Gascoigne, also mentioned in the AP article, we find more of Kate’s entertainment and celebrity cousins. They include Anthony Perkins, Cary Elwes, Christopher Reeve, Grace Slick, Hilary Duff, Montgomery Clift, Paul Giamatti, Sarah Ferguson, Mitt Romney, and U.S. Presidents Taft and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Family Forest® Ancestors-at-a-glance(TM) charts for most of the above mentioned cousins of future queen Kate Middleton can be found here. And for more thought-provoking edutainment, you can visually explore Kate’s and Prince William’s generation-by-generation ancestral pathways leading to many of human history’s most famous ancestors in the Family Forest® National Treasure Edition.

Everyday folks (See FAQ #4), like me, make up most of Kate’s hundreds of thousands of relatives she is already networked to in the Family Forest®. Maybe you or one of your ancestors are one of them?

Who would have been more surprised? Would it have been Sir Henry Percy to learn that two of his descendants each also acquired a great reputation as a warrior? Or would it have been Sergeant York and Audie Murphy to discover they both shared the same famous warrior ancestor?

Isn’t it best to find out first what the experts have already discovered? Why use any of your valuable research time to search for what’s already been found?

I just read a short preface in a book that was written more than a century ago. If you have any interest in discovering more of your ancestors, it is valuable for you to read it.

It illuminates how some of our ancestors were thinking long before we were born, and more importanly, it reveals a secret that genealogy big business does not want you to know.

In 1894 Guy Scoby Rix began a valuable 20-year genealogy research project that includes parts of the ancestry of probably more than one million living people. From Concord, NH in 1905, he wrote the preface to his work. It reveals his character, his intentions, and his commitment to accuracy.

Over the centuries there have been thousands of people like Mr. Rix who have published similar works on different families. Isn’t it much smarter to find out what knowledge is contained in those works, before spending tedious efforts sifting through raw unfiltered data?

The next time someone suggests that the first place for you to begin searching for your ancestors is in the raw data that hundreds or thousands of oftentimes very qualified people have been combing through for decades if not centuries, ask them, why?

Isn’t it best to find out first what the experts have already discovered? Why use any of your valuable research time to search for what’s already been found?